Off-topic Question

Matthew Keeley · 18 May 2008, 14:22 · from 2008-May.txt.gz

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From: matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com (Matthew Keeley)
Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 15:22:22 +0100
Subject: (urth) Off-topic Question
In-Reply-To: <022DED5E-76A4-4320-981C-B17561729755 at io.com>
References: <482f9eaf.9d.4072.4700 at mail.rochester.edu>
	<022DED5E-76A4-4320-981C-B17561729755 at io.com>
Message-ID: <44fb53d10805180722r5209973cob9ef1233a27712ea at mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:

>
> On May 17, 2008, at 10:12 PM, dcooperv wrote:
>
>  You could probably put Hammett and Chandler in there, possibly on the
>> irreligious side. I say this only because (IMO) it's near-impossible to
>> have an
>> intelligent discussion of the genre without acknowledging these two, given
>> the
>> significance of their contributions. I always saw them as existentialist
>> more
>> than anything else really. Of course, existentialism does not preclude
>> religiosity by any means (and nothing bugs me like a false dichotomy!).
>> Read
>> Dostoeyevsky and Martin Buber for good examples of this.
>> Can you give us a more specific idea of your thesis? If nothing else, this
>> could
>> spark some enlightening conversation.
>>
>
> And, man, Chandler is underrated.
>
> That's some complex and delicious stuff there.  Marlowe is *so* much
> smarter and better-educated than he lets on; one of my favorite
> not-quite-reliable narrators (there's the Wolfean connection).  As far as
> I'm concerned, _The Big Sleep_ is one of the great books of the 20th
> Century.  Chandler is--hey, another Wolfean connection--a genre writer who
> was *spectacularly* good, not just compared to the rest of the genre, but
> period.
>
> Adam
>

Agreed that Marlowe is smarter than he pretends to be. He isn't phased when
someone quotes Christopher Marlowe's Faust at him in The Long Goodbye for
example.

As for "a more specific version of my thesis," I'm still in the preparation
phase, so I don't have too much yet. At the moment I'm just trying to pin
down a good reading list - I expect I'll be reading lots of this stuff over
the summer.

-Matt
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